Me and Mike Barnicle
From cigars in a corner office to stories built on thin air, lessons from the columnist who mastered the art of filling space.
I started my writing career at The Boston Globe. I didn’t set out to become a journalist. I thought I wanted to be a writer, but more along the lines of novels than newspapers. But there I was, in the newsroom, among professional reporters and editors, cranking out the daily news.
It was 1991, and the star of the Globe was columnist Mike Barnicle. A hard-scrabble sort, he mused on the comings and goings of average people and high-profile personalities of the Bay State. He was the common man’s thinker—relatable and easy to read. People didn’t just enjoy his columns; they looked forward to them.
Back then, the Globe newsroom was a cavernous, open space filled with desks and workstations. The perimeter was lined with private, glass-walled offices. Unlike television portrayals that showed a constant beehive of activity, the average newsroom was just like any other office environment. Barnicle’s office, however, wasn’t among the commoners. He had a quiet, windowless space around the corner, down the hall, where he smoked cigars while tapping out his stories.
Barnicle had a bit of a reputation for, shall we say, embellishing. He was frequently accused of concocting stories out of thin air and outright plagiarizing other writers. Boston Magazine ran a recurring column called “Barnicle Watch,” fact-checking his work. A few pieces claimed that he essentially rewrote and contextualized for Boston pieces originally written by famed Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mike Royko.
At a conference in Las Vegas, I was introduced to a Sun-Times alum who had worked with Royko. I told him that I loved Royko’s writing, having read Barnicle for years. The joke wasn’t lost on him, though it didn’t translate well to everyone else.
We had a joke in the newsroom that whenever Barnicle wrote about the Marines or Parris Island, it meant he was fresh out of ideas. If he had nothing good to say, he leaned on military experiences. Spoiler alert: he was never in the Marines. No matter—he could still spin a good yarn.
After leaving the Globe, I went to work for a small newspaper group in the suburbs north of Boston. The publisher, a local real estate developer who got into media to influence local governments on zoning policies, had hired a woman who worked with Barnicle early in their careers. She was a raging alcoholic, but a fine editor. She frequently described Barnicle as the “fair-haired boy” who could do no wrong.
The world caught up to Barnicle in 1998. The allegations of plagiarism and embellishment became too much for the Globe brass. He was forced to resign and went into exile. He floated for a while, writing for the New York Post, and ultimately joined MSNBC as a professional talking head.
Where am I going with this story about Mike Barnicle? Nowhere. I have nothing to write about today. Everyone is talking about the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska that resulted in nothing, the federal government’s attempts at taking over the Washington, D.C., police, the ongoing saga of the Epstein files, and the tit-for-tat redistricting wars in Texas and California. I have nothing good to add to any of those storylines right now.
So instead, I figured I would pull a Barnicle and write about nothing. I hope you enjoyed it.
This was brilliant. So let me share something with you that compounds the irony that Barnicle worked for the NY Post. When News Corp. bought the Chicago paper Royko resigned, but not before penning a column in which he wrote that “no self-respecting fish would want to be wrapped in one of Mr. Murdoch’s papers.”
When Murdoch visited Columbia College and met with members of the Spectator, he was asked why he had turned a once-respectable paper into the, well, the rag that it is, Murdoch replied, “stupid people deserve a paper too.”
Murdpch’s paper for stupid people quickly took off, but ad sales didn’t follow, so he organized a meeting of the city’s largest advertisers and confronted them with the fact that Post circ was outstripped that of its rivals, to which the ad buyer for Alexander’s reportedly responded, “be that as it may, Mr. Murdoch, but your readers are our shoplifters.”
I hope this comment serves as an adequate response to the article to which it is attached.
Affectionately, Michael